Swimming with Gummy Bears

I am fifteen years old and I cannot swim. Which would be fine—really, it would—if my crush Kayla hadn't invited me to her pool party next Saturday.

"You're coming, right?" she'd asked, tapping her phone against her locker door. "Everyone's gonna be there."

Everyone. Including maybe me, doggy-paddling in the shallow end while my dignity drowns in three feet of water.

The plan: Learn to swim in four days. The execution: A series of increasingly humiliating YouTube tutorials in my living room while my seven-year-old sister critiques my form.

"You look like a dying tadpole," she says, eating my gummy vitamins off the coffee table. Those vitamins are my actual fuel. My mom started buying them because I'm "picky," which is code for "lives on pizza and anxiety."

"Those're mine, Lily."

"They're shaped like bears. They're basically candy." She tosses a red one into her mouth. "You're stressing about this party too much. Just say you're on your period or something."

"That doesn't work when I'm literally a boy, Lily."

Good point, though. I could fake an injury. Or develop a sudden allergy to chlorine. Or move to Canada.

Instead, I show up at Kayla's house in swim trunks that are slightly too long because I grew two inches since last summer and nobody told me my ankles would look this awkward. The backyard is already packed—people from school, people I've never met, someone's older brother who brought a speaker that's definitely too powerful for a residential pool party.

I hover near the snack table, clutching a Vitamin Water like it's emotional support ammunition.

"Marcus!" Kayla appears behind me, smelling like coconut everything. "You made it!" She's wearing this purple bikini that makes my brain short-circuit. "Get in—the water's perfect."

People are looking. Not staring, but enough that I can feel the judgment radiating like heat waves. The water is sparkling, mocking me.

"I'm good," I say. "Just, you know, digesting."

"Digesting what? A Vitamin Water?" She laughs, and it's this sound that makes everything worse and better at the same time. "Come on, nobody's judging how deep you go. Just get wet."

She pulls me toward the pool and there's this moment where I could resist, could make up some excuse, could preserve my dignity at the cost of looking like a coward forever. But she's still holding my hand and her palm is soft and everything terrible and wonderful about being fifteen is compressed into this single second.

So I step in.

The water hits my waist and I don't immediately drown, which feels like a victory. Kayla lets go of my hand and splashes water at my face, shrieking when I splash back instinctively. Someone yells "MARCO POLO" and suddenly I'm part of it, chest-deep in chlorinated water, pretending I'm not counting the seconds until I can retreat to the safety of the snack table.

But then Kayla grabs my shoulders and we're underwater for a second, the world muffled and blue and weightless, and when we come up gasping for air she's grinning like this is the best moment of her life.

"See?" She wipes water from her eyes. "Not so bad."

And the weird thing is, she's right. I'm not swimming, exactly—I'm mostly standing and trying not to fall—but I'm in the water. I'm here. I'm not the dying tadpole my sister said I was. I'm just Marcus, fifteen years old, waist-deep in a pool, holding a Vitamin Water, watching a girl who makes me forget how to breathe.

Later, when my mom asks how it went, I don't mention the near-panic attack or the fact that I still can't actually swim. I just say, "Fine. It was fine."

"Did you use your sunscreen?"

"Yes, Mom."

"Did you eat your vitamins this morning?"

"Yes, Mom."

Some of them, anyway. The bear-shaped ones. The ones that taste like cherry and courage and the terrible, wonderful business of growing up.